One of the advantages of the digital content is the ability to share and inspire and show others how the hobby doesn’t have to be a consumer spree and by the arts and crafts of creativity a lot can be achieved.
Having seen one of those inspiring types of content, where a fellow wargamer picks up a blank sheet of paper and creates something worth of being played, I took on the same vein and create also my own solo wargaming campaign.
There are countless tools to do this and I decided, again by being exposed to said content, to use William Silvester’s the Solo Wargaming Guide which aims exactly at the intended aims – being able to run a campaign for an uncertain length of time in which the tactical level is resolved by my chosen rules set and the strategic and operational levels are guided by Mr. Silvester’s excellent compendium of ideas and guidelines.
Next I had to decide whether I wanted something firmly grounded on History and having its starting point on Historical fact and events or go for a free and loose approach of “imagiNations” in which the warfare type can be traced to Historical fact but the powers, leaders, locations are not being a miscellany of ideas to give character to both Blues and Reds.
I decided to go with made up nations and pre-imperial Rome such as the triumvirate civil wars – Pompey versus Julius Caesar.
The why this specific era is important given the book has a veiled focus on gunpowder era. There’s two fold reasons. One being that all my miniatures are focused for skirmish rules and the only ones that could be used, 2mm Irregular Miniatures american civil war, are still being painted and as such not yet ready to field and the other being that I decided to acquire a board wargame system that was just launched this past year and designed by Mike Nagel ( the mind behind Flying Colors naval wargame ).
I decided for Dawn of Battle, published by Old School Wargames / Worthington Publishing. As yet is just the base board and pieces and rules and cards and… with imagination and craft any wargamer worth its salt can make do and populate the battlefield easily with terrain and challenges for the commanders.
So there you have it. The two tools I will be using to guide my own solo wargaming campaign.
And it all starts with a map.
wargamer.coffee.break 